André heads the Software Design and Collaboration Laboratory, which focuses on understanding and advancing the role of design, coordination, and education in software development. He has authored and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, and in 2006 was a recipient of an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. He is a co-author of the 2005 Configuration Management Impact Report as well as the 2007 Futures of Software Engineering Report on Software Design and Architecture. He has served on numerous international program committees, was a member of the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology from 2008 to 2014, was program chair of the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, and was program co-chair of the 2014 International Conference on Software Engineering. He was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2013, and in 2009 he was a recipient of the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware. He is the principal designer of the B.S. in Informatics at UC Irvine and was honored, in 2005, as UC Irvine Professor of the Year for his outstanding and innovative educational contributions.

His graduate work addressed distributed configuration management and versioned software architecture from a strictly technical perspective, but since his arrival at UCIrvine he has been influenced by his colleagues in the Department of Informatics to address a broader research agenda that places his work in a human perspective. His research bridges into the educational realm by developing and critically evaluating new approaches to teaching software engineering, particularly for those topics that traditionally are difficult to address in the classroom.